Ajay is based in BCV's Palo Alto office and focuses on early stage software investing

What’s next after SaaS? Big Data Applications

Today one of our portfolio companies, Bloomreach, announced a new funding round led by NEA and their partners Scott Sandell and Ravi Viswanathan. Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed also participated in the round. We are thrilled to work with NEA and welcome them to Bloomreach. I have known NEA for 17 years…their managing partner, Peter Barris, was on the board of Trilogy. Peter, Scott, Ravi and the entire partnership at NEA are world-class.

I had the good fortune of meeting Raj De Datta and Ashutosh Garg, the co-founders of Bloomreach, four years ago. At the time, it was the two of them and an idea. The founders wanted to solve the “content discovery” problem online and make sure that every web business in the world could be effectively “found” by their respective customers. Together, we at Bain Capital Ventures and the founders spoke to over 25 CMOs to validate this opportunity – the feedback was extremely strong and helped shape the initial product vision. We subsequently led the Series A funding in March of 2009, alongside a great group of strategic angel investors.

Less than four years later, Bloomreach employs 100 people and is on path to being the fastest growing SaaS company in history. They are one of the pioneers in the emerging Big Data Applications space: using data from inside and outside the enterprise to transform enterprise functions. Bloomreach uses techniques such as machine learning, web crawling, and search technology to mine a massive amount of data. That data drives marketing insights, new customer traffic and most importantly, new revenue. On average, BloomReach customers see 94% lift in non-branded, natural search traffic.

Unlike the last generation of SaaS and cloud marketing applications, Bloomreach is not a “form on top of a database” or a repository of manually entered data and workflow. These types of sales and marketing automation solutions are necessary and important, but fail to deliver real measurable business value and ROI to the enterprise. In contrast, Bloomreach and companies like it are helping web businesses large and small enjoy high margin revenue through an automated service and by doing so, are transforming the marketing function….which we believe is the next 10 Billion dollar opportunity in enterprise technology

Raj and Ashutosh have been outstanding founders and exemplary leaders. They have created a company and culture that is built to last. The last four years have been a fantastic journey. The opportunity for Bloomreach is awesome and we look forward to deploying the new funding in relentless pursuit of our vision.